King Canute tried to control the sea. He failed – obviously, it’s the sea, mate – but Brazilian artist Lucas Arruda has learned that guy’s lesson: his small, obsessive paintings don’t try to control a vast body of water, they try to capture it. Each of the neat little works here features a big blank sky, an infinite horizon and an expanse of shimmering water. A couple depict closer views of palm trees and forests, but most are minuscule expanses of nothingness.
Dark angry skies filled with vicious clouds, foggy pink washes, midnight visions, torrential rain and grumpy sunsets are in the show. Arruda paints them, apparently, from his imagination, so they take on a meditative quality, a sort of palpable moodiness.
Maybe it’s just because London’s been starved of new exhibitions for almost two months over the summer, but the show is a lovely little embrace and there’s much to like. The pieces are absorbing but little, and in their almost psychotic repetitiveness, they feel like a distillation of century upon century of sea painting. Especially once you get to the pitch-black backroom with its hand-painted slides. They feel like hazy memories of JMW Turner, Nicolas de Staël, Claude Monet and Edvard Munch, re-imaginings of old paintings.
The works aren’t groundbreaking, or original, or new, or even that special, but they are sort of lovely in their obsessive therapeuticness. It’s not a trip to the seaside, but it’ll have to do.
@eddyfrankel